Space Monkey Dropbox Competitor Wins Launch, Has Already Raised $750K
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Can someone help me understand this trend? What makes a company feel like they can win here?
It seems like the benefit these companies are offering largely fall into these categories:
1. peer to peer/distributed storage
2. "value" more storage at cheaper prices
3. anonymity / better security
These aren't pain points for Dropbox users. To each point above, in turn:
1. Most users don't care about how their files are stored, they just want them to be available. It doesn't matter to them that they're distributed or that its peer to peer. They just want them to show up whenever they click their shared folder.
2. This doesn't seem like a winnable race by selling more storage capacity. 98% of dropbox users don't use the free 2GB. 2% of them happily pay for more space. Sure "twice the amount for the same price" sounds compelling, but the only people you are going to reach are either (a) users who are unhappily paying [small subset, and the friction of switching services is still high], (b) users who would otherwise go over the free barrier but don't want to pay [small set, again, very high friction of switching services], and (c) people who are not Dropbox users and are comparing the Dropbox vs Space Money/BitCasa/etc side by side and decide to go with the "more space" option [hard to win this initially because Dropbox has rave reviews and you're unheard of, you have to be as good as Dropbox at reaching out to everyone, you probably won't have Dropbox's dead simple UI]
3. Anonymity / Better security -- Also something that sounds good, but not a pain point for the majority of internet users. The class of users for which anonymous file storage or next level security is an issue is (a) very small, (b) overlaps heavily with the "I'd rather implement this myself" computing class. This market isn't big. Again, there's a fighting shot when a user with no cloud storage compares both services side by side, but you still have to match Dropbox's reach.
Dropbox was selling EASE. They have a really easy process, the product "just works", they are better at reaching their potential customers (more practice/lots of raving fans), support more platforms (I've been waiting for beta access for Linux for one of these for BitCasa for months), and most importantly: for the huge majority of internet users the additional benefits are irrelevant. Dropbox's win is serving a huge class of users and making most of them extremely happy. Another note is that the type of users who want to use these services for "infinite storage" are also very expensive users to support. If you're building a business you should prefer to serve the largest base of users who cost you the smallest amount of money but are willing to pay the same amount. Not, "a highly specialized, expensive user class that is highly price sensitive".
750k isn't going to be enough to overcome these hurdles. The only rationale I can come up with for VCs is that they are essentially writing it off as a lottery ticket in their portfolio.
This is exactly the difference between Dropbox and SpaceMonkey. a few GB vs 1TB. People use Dropbox only for syncing a few files because the space is so limited. Dropbox is essentially a replacement for your USB flash drive. SpaceMonkey is positioning themselves as a replacement for your media server.
So I don't think you can't dismiss the storage space point by saying that "98% of Dropbox users don't use all the space". Because people would use Dropbox for other things if you could store your entire digital library in there.
Personally I'd love to replace my external TB hard drive that holds all my music, photos, videos, etc. with a magic box that keeps it all backed up securely in the cloud.
But, for the sake of argument, let me play devil's advocate and take the "yes, of course you should do it, dugh".
1. Yes, users care that their files are available. Given the recent megaupload events and the outbreak of copyright-related-madness that has contaminated the US government, I don't discard the possibility that some random raid might cause Dropbox files to be unavailable. The reason for the raid might be because "users are using Dropbox to illegally store copyrighted files", which I'm sure it's true. For availability, distributed is better than centralized, period. Of course, I have 4 or 5 fully synced computers, so my Dropbox setup already is kind of distributed and I would be relatively immune, but I sincerely don't know how many users use this kind of setup.
2. I don't go over the free quota because I'm constantly policing my files and removing everything that is not essential. What I would really like is to use Dropbox as a backup-everything-sync-everywhere tool, not as a sync-essential-stuff-everywhere tool, but I currently do my on backups, because I can't bring myself to paying 10 bucks a month for 50GB space if I'm only using 10GB.
3. I agree. Most people don't care about anonymity unless they are affected by the lack of it in a way that is both personal and perceived as negative, which most aren't.
Ease: there is nothing that makes the Space Monkey way fundamentally more difficult for the user. Of course, the user's internet connection might fail a little bit, and probably any contender that wants to compete in this area will have to plan for that scenario, but this is not a deal-breaking thing (for instance, they can store user A's data on user B's device when A's connection is not working properly).
Taking of my devil's advocate mask, while I believe there might be some space for companies in the "Dropbox competitor" space, I believe being just a "Dropbox competitor" won't cut it, even though I would like someone else to succeed even if just for the sake of diversity.
I also believe Dropbox is more like a feature than a product, and putting a special-purpose device inside someone's house offers you the possibility of turning said device into a kind of command-of-control thing, such that it can do many things more than being just a backup-and-sync device. For instance, I could be on the street, hear about a movie, and use my cell phone to make my device buy and download this movie so that when I'm home I'll be able to watch it. This kind of stuff would bring "just works" to a whole new level.
By the way, I buy a movie using the device, Space Monkey might take a cut. God, the hardware these days is so cheap that it might be possible to offer it for free and make money by taking a cut on every transaction.
Combine that with DB's ease of use and there's huge space for a competitor to jump in.
Another possible entrance is to improve DB's shared file concept. Right now u/l'ing to a certain folder and sharing the link puts stuff on the internet. But there are many restrictions to how that works. Make it so the stuff just hosts there without any particular limits and you've suddenly provided an ad hoc hosting service for folks to use. Provide some simple templates and now you don't need flickr, soundcloud, most web hosting services, ftp sites, etc. There's a huge space of web hosting that doesn't require dynamic page generation supported by a database.
I agree that $750k to go head-to-head against DB would be futile.
Can you point to some examples in this space?
Also, despite this company's assurance about encryption, hell, the way Anonymous has cracked open things out there, I'm not about to trust anyone with even fractions of my data, especially since I think many Anonymous members will scoop this up and get busy hacking it.
[typo edit]
> Your data is still accessible even if you are outside of your home and your home ISP experiences an outage."
In light of the RSA reference it seems like they encrypt every thing with a user pubkey and a company pubkey. Without the company pubkey there would be no way to access your data when you were not at home.
Is Space Monkey a turn-key backup solution? E.g. if my SM drive explodes, can I get my data back with a new SM drive?
This service does not seem any different from the other handful of P2P backup solutions [1] except for the included hardware. Maybe the difference is as a standalone network drive it would more difficult to restrict upload rate or switch off the program when you don't want to upload data.
Also it is uncertain whether multiple drives are needed for the thing to work in separate locations, e.g. transferring files from office to home.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_ser...
I was always under the impression FreedomBox would never catch on because 1) they don't know how to make the software attractive and enticing and 2) requiring users to have some specialized hardware acting as a server is a big hurdle for most people. Also, and perhaps this is the biggest problem, the alternative centralized and cloud services are good enough for the vast majority of people.
Space Monkey looks cool but I'm not sure they're cool enough to overcome these obstacles. Also peer-to-peer provides its own weird drawbacks (similar with Skype) in that your home network is now being used as someone else's infrastructure. For a backup service data usage is going to be very high.
Perhaps in that world, families can simply plug a box in the wall at home and that's how they deal with email, photos, shared calendars, with different (private) profiles for each family member. Family members can 'graduate' to their own private box when they leave home (eg Uni) and simply take it all with them.
I can also imagine a world where people don't do any of the above. We won't really know until we get there, but I'm pleased that there people trying different things to find out.
While I'm not saying there's not room in the space for multiple companies, CrashPlan sounds like a more-attractive alternative than being required to buy a special hard drive or pay a monthly fee to use this type of service.
All of these similar solution always beg the question, "why does dropbox need to be changed"? It is simple, and just works. This makes it attractive to the masses.
While I don't necessarily subscribe to "if it 'aint broke, don't fix it" I wonder how any company can dethrone dropbox by offering such a similiar service. It will likely appeal to the tech crowd...but the masses? They will have to convince the masses that they are missing something using dropbox. Is this not one of the reasons that sites like Identica will never be as popular as facebook (maybe Identica has never had such lofty goals).
If this product could be used for my time machine backups (ideally with a wireless connected to my laptop), and then be sync'd to "the cloud"...i would pay for it in the blink of an eye.
Seriously, am I missing something here?
"Your browser doesn't support the features required by impress.js, so you are presented with a simplified version of this presentation."
So I have to say I'm not too impressed by impress.js